Kuder Occupational Interest Survey Research Articles

Thirty-Year Stability and Predictive Validity of Vocational Interests

This study reports a 30-year follow-up of 107 former high school juniors and seniors from a rural Midwestern community who completed the Kuder Occupational Interest Survey (KOIS) in 1975 and 2005.Absolute, intra-individual, and test-retest stability of interests, and predictive validity of occupations were examined. Results showed minor absolute (mean) changes, moderate intra-individual stability (Spearman rho = .54), and scale test-retest correlations ranging from .10 to .76. This study corroborates earlier stability studies and extends our understanding of why some individuals show unstable interest patterns. Several Time 1 KOIS interest scores correlated with intra-individual stability itself. Comparisons between 1975 KOIS scores and 2005 occupation using the Brown-Gore C-index demonstrated predictive validity by yielding fit indices for women and men exceeding the theoretical mean. Findings inform our understanding of midlife career development and have implications for career counseling practice.

Kuder Career Search with Person Match: The Third-Generation Approach

The Kuder preference records have enjoyed a long and respected role in career guidance. Frederic Kuder introduced his first preference record in 1939, establishing the model of forced-choice responses and homogeneous vocational preference scales that was the basis for the present Kuder General Interest Survey. In its second generation, the Kuder Occupational Interest Survey, it was enlarged to include criterion group scales revealing the survey-taker's similarity with persons in an array of more than 140 occupations and college majors. A third generation has been developed in the past decade: Kuder Career Search with Person Match. In this version, the survey-taker's vocational preferences are matched not with occupations, but with each of a number of persons in an array of occupations representing the full spectrum of the world of work. This article introduces Kuder's radical approach to career guidance.

Ellenore Flood's Kuder Occupational Interest Survey and Career Search Schedule

The Kuder Occupational Interest Survey and Career Search Schedule are interpreted for a client (given the pseudonym Ellenore Flood) in the form of a letter addressed to her. Comments on technique, the author's reasoning, and suggestions for further interventions are interpolated throughout.

Interpreting Interest Inventories: A Case Example

Interest inventory interpretation is one of the most frequently used interventions in career counseling. As a beginning counselor, found myself astounded by the ability of my senior colleagues to describe and understand nuances of an individual's behavior just from examining her or his interest inventory profile. As worked to develop skill at inventory interpretation, repeatedly read a book edited by Donald Zytowski (1973). What made this book so useful was chapter 9, Illustrative Interpretations of Inventories, which contained examples of interest inventory developers interpreting the profiles of three clients. Studying the text of their interpretations allowed readers to scrutinize how highly skilled practitioners interpreted interest profiles. This special section of The Career Development Quarterly is an attempt to emulate Zytowski's classic book by having expert career counselors interpret their favorite interest inventories. In consultation with Arnold Spokane, chose to include five widely used interest inventories. Then we identified career counselors who each use one of these inventories with great success and recruited them to do a blind interpretation of that inventory. The inventories and their interpreters include: Campbell Interest and Skill Survey (Kathleen Boggs), Kuder Occupational Interest Survey (Donald Zytowski), SelfDirected Search (Jack Rayman), Strong Interest Inventory (Jeffrey Prince), and the Unisex Edition of the ACT Interest Inventory (Dale Prediger & Edward Schmertz). In addition, Linda Subich agreed to interpret the Skills Confidence Inventory, an optional part of the Strong Interest Inventory, and Paul Hartung agreed to interpret the Salience Inventory and the Values Scale, two inventories that some counselors use in conjunction with interest inventories (Osborne, Brown, Niles, & Miner, 1997). Each of these career counselors received a summary of the initial interview with an actual client who had recently sought career counseling, Ellenore Flood (a pseudonym). Ms. Flood volunteered to participate in this project and made it possible by responding to all of the inventories, granting permission to use the summary of her initial interview, which she edited, providing copies of her inventory results to the authors of the articles, and writing a response to their interpretations of her inventory results. In addition to Ms. Flood's response, Arnold Spokane contributed an article that examines the similarities and differences in the inventories and their interpretations. The authors hope that this special section of the Quarterly will allow readers to learn more about interest inventory interpretation. We think it provides a unique opportunity to examine how five inventories profile the interests of a single client. What follows is the summary of the initial interview that was given to the article authors. The only other information they received about Ms. Flood was the profile for the particular interest inventory that they interpreted. ELLENORE FLOOD: SUMMARY OF THE INITIAL INTERVIEW Ellenore Flood is a 29-year-old, White woman who works as a high school teacher of English and French. At the beginning of her interview, she asked the career counselor to Help me sort out all of the things I've got going right now-job possibilities, making decisions, focusing. Ellenore thought that within 4 months, she had to choose from four career options: renewing her teaching contract, applying for a teaching position at an American school in Italy, beginning a doctoral program, or taking a marketing job in the European office of a former employer. Each alternative included a specific prospective position for which Ellenore was well-qualified. Faced with so many options, Ellenore said, I can't decide. I'm treading water. The need to choose arose because Ellenore had just ended a 3-year relationship with her boyfriend. She could not afford to continue in her position as a high school teacher because her monthly bills exceeded her pay. …

Development of a Career Task Self-Efficacy Scale: The Kuder Task Self-Efficacy Scale

The present study consisted of developing the Kuder Task Self-Efficacy Scale (KTSES). The KTSES is a 30-item scale measuring a person's self-efficacy for tasks corresponding to Kuder's 10 occupational interest areas (Kuder Zytowski, 1991). Responses from the KTSES were compared with responses to the Self-Esteem Inventory (SES; Rosenberg, 1965) and the Career Decision-Making Self-Efficacy Scale (CDMSE; Taylor Betz, 1983) to see if career task self-efficacy was related to self-esteem and career decision-making self-efficacy. Answers to the KTSES were also compared with responses given for occupations corresponding to the Kuder Occupational Interest Survey (KOIS; Kuder Zytowski, 1991) to see if occupational self-efficacy was related to career task self-efficacy. Results supported the validity and reliability of the KTSES. The utility of having a task self-efficacy scale to go with the KOIS is discussed, and ideas for future research are given.

Interest Inventory Scores and Work Experiences: Commentary on a Case Study

Don Zytowski's autobiographical work history, including four Kuder Occupational Interest Survey (KOIS; Kuder & Zytowski, 1991) profiles over a 30-year period, offers the reader a rare opportunity to examine issues about what a person learns from his or her interest inventory scores. Furthermore, the author-subject knows the KOIS as well as anyone. He possesses the technical knowledge and clinical understanding to provide a thorough explanation and a provocative interpretation. I also recall an earlier article in which one of Don's career counseling clients and he frankly evaluated their counseling processes (Stark & Zytowski, 1988), so I doubt that he needs to fake good. My comments are about vocational interest inventory scores in combination with autobiographical accounts of work experiences and the learning opportunities they present to career counselors. Most striking to me are the novel and fascinating longitudinal interest themes. They are novel because few work histories contain repeated standardized measures. They are fascinating because the four interest themes give explanatory strength to Don's interpretation, like topic sentences do for paragraphs in an essay. Their practical usefulness to the typical career counselor may be limited, because, after all, how many people go back to their counseling psychologist every decade or so for a career checkup? Certainly career counselors believe that adult workers would find this helpful just as they find regular visits to the dentist or an accountant helpful, but it does not seem to have caught on. Nevertheless, career counselors can strive to extract longitudinal interest themes when constructing post hoc work histories. The coherence of Don's career history becomes strained, however, when he tries to make connections between the inventory scores and specific work experiences. When KOIS scores were not consonant with his occupational pursuits, for example the low Social Service Vocational Interest Estimates (VIE) scores as contrasted with his direct client service work and expressed interest in helping people, Don searched for explanations by invoking the ipsative nature of KOIS scores and by re-framing the nature of his counseling activities. The ipsative scores on the KOIS offer an advantage to the inventory taker by identifying comparative high and low interests, thus differentiating among the options in a choice situation. Apparently, Don consistently chose many KOIS foils representing activities other than social service, yet he persisted in a person-intensive occupation.There is a mystery here. His solution seems to lie in re-casting his counseling work as a puzzlesolving or hypothesis-generating activity. Because he is reconstructing his own career, I must accept that. As a blind interpreter, I would suggest that he also examine KOIS scales or items for clues. Nevertheless, in the re-casting process, Don may have created a promising new prediction criterion for interest scores, an alternative to occupational title or job satisfaction: the criterion of intrinsically rewarding activity. …

The Practice of Vocational Assessment by Counseling Psychologists

One thousand American Psychological Association members who identified counseling as their psychology specialty were surveyed about their vocational assessment practices; 637 or 64% returned usable questionnaires. Some of the primary findings were as follows: (a) 56% of the respondents were engaged in providing vocational assessment services and spent about 8% of their professional time doing so; (b) vocational assessment services were provided by a moderate to relatively frequent number of practitioners across most considered work settings; (c) respondents most frequently recommended that graduate students in counseling psychology be trained in the Strong Interest Inventory (SI!); and (d) regardless of work setting, respondents most frequently used the SII, Self-Directed Search, and Kuder Occupational Interest Survey in their vocational assessment practice. The implications of the findings are briefly discussed, with particular mention being made about (a) the continued relevance of vocational assessment for counseling psychology practice, and (b) the continuing preeminence of the SII in contemporary vocational assessment.

Three Generations: The Continuing Evolution of Frederic Kuder's Interest Inventories

In this article the author reviews the history of Frederic Kuder's work in interest measurement and the development of two of his interest inventories currently in use—the Kuder General Interest Survey and the Kuder Occupational Interest Survey. Features of the inventories' most recent editions are discussed, emphasizing those that distinguish them from other popular interest measures. In addition, a third‐generation Kuder inventory is briefly described.

Still in Vietnam:

It was hypothesized that Vietnam veterans with PTSD have not successfully accomplished the task of Erikson's 5th psychosocial stage of development, Identity versus identity diffusion. Indices of career maturity from the Kuder Occupational Interest Survey were lower than recommended for a career choice process to take place (Wigington, 1982). These Vietnam veterans (Patients of the VA Medical Center North Chicago) were administered the Crites Career Maturity Inventory. Their scores most closely approximated the average for children in the 7th and 8th grades who were 15-20 years younger than our clients. When compared to a norm group of high school seniors the average score of the veterans was in the 23rd percentile. It was suggested that these clients were vulnerable to the developmental shock of PTSD due to unsuccessful passage through earlier Eriksonian stages.

Kuder Occupational Interest Survey, Form DD

(1985). Kuder Occupational Interest Survey, Form DD. Measurement and Evaluation in Counseling and Development: Vol. 17, No. 4, pp. 217-219.

Career maturity aspects of the Kuder Occupational Interest Survey

The Kuder Occupational Interest Survey (1979) (KOIS) is used in counseling services as an aid in career counseling, but the KOIS does not have a measure of career maturity. The purpose of this study was to determine if selected scores from the KOIS could be indicative of client career maturity. The data for each subject included three scores from the KOIS and one measure of career maturity. The three scores from the KOIS included the highest Occupation score, the highest College Major score, and either the Father score for male subjects or the Mother score for female subjects. Career maturity was assessed with the Career Maturity Inventory Attitude Scale (1973) (CMI). The three scores from the KOIS were correlated with the score from the CMI to determine the relationship between the KOIS and career maturity. t tests were used to test for significant differences between men and women on the four measures. Significant correlations were found between the KOIS scores and career maturity, supporting the statements in the KOIS manual regarding the relationship between high KOIS scores and maturity. There was no significant difference between females and males on the CMI, Occupation, or College Major scores, but females scored significantly higher on the Mother scale than males did on the Father scale. Implications for career counseling were discussed.

Sex-typical and sex-atypical interests of Kuder Occupational Interest Survey criterion groups: Implications for counseling.

Sex-typical and sex-atypical interests of Kuder Occupational Interest Survey criterion groups: Implications for counseling.

Sex-typical and sex-atypical interests of Kuder Occupational Interest Survey criterion groups: Implications for counseling.

Sex-typical and sex-atypical interests of Kuder Occupational Interest Survey criterion groups: Implications for counseling.

Sex-typical and sex-atypical interests of Kuder Occupational Interest Survey criterion groups: Implications for counseling.

Sex-typical and sex-atypical interests of Kuder Occupational Interest Survey criterion groups: Implications for counseling.

A Response to Weinrach's “Discrepancy Identification: A Model for the Interpretation of the Kuder DD and Other interest Inventories”

Vocational Guidance QuarterlyVolume 29, Issue 1 p. 53-55 A Response to Weinrach's “Discrepancy Identification: A Model for the Interpretation of the Kuder DD and Other interest Inventories” ESTHER E. DIAMOND, ESTHER E. DIAMOND Esther E. Diamond is development program manager, Guidance Testing, at Science Research Associates, Chicago. She has worked extensively on the development and revision of the Kuder Occupational Interest Survey, Form DD.Search for more papers by this author ESTHER E. DIAMOND, ESTHER E. DIAMOND Esther E. Diamond is development program manager, Guidance Testing, at Science Research Associates, Chicago. She has worked extensively on the development and revision of the Kuder Occupational Interest Survey, Form DD.Search for more papers by this author First published: September 1980 https://doi.org/10.1002/j.2164-585X.1980.tb01020.x AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Volume29, Issue1September 1980Pages 53-55 RelatedInformation

Predicting Graduation from a Police Academy with the Kuder Occupational Interest Survey

Vocational guidance tests appear to be of little use for predicting success in the training academy (e.g., DuBois & Watson, 1950). The present study was designed to explore their usefulness in a modern training academy. 115 male state police recruits who graduated from a training academy were compared with 24 who resigned or who were dismissed for their scores on the Kuder Occupational Interest Survey, Form DD (Kuder, 1970) which provides scores for 77 occupations and 29 college majors. The two groups differed significantly at the 5 O/o level on only one of the 77 occupational scales, that for radio station manager, and one significant result in 77 comparisons is very likely to be due to chance. In particular, the two groups did not differ in their scores on the police officer scale (respective means 0.46 and 0.43, SDs = 0.09 and 0.10, t = 1.53, df = 137, p = 0.13). The two groups differed significantly on three of the 29 college majors: those graduating scored higher on physical education (means 0.51 and 0.47, t = 2.04, p = 0.04), US air force cadet (0.46 and 0.42, t = 1.99, p = 0.05), and US military cadet (0.45 and 0.40, r = 2.14, p = 0.03). The mean score for those graduating was higher on 75 of the 77 occupational scales and on all 29 college major scales. Each subject was scored for how many college major scales he was below the average of all 139 subjects. These scores failed to differentiate the two groups (mean scores 13.2 and 15.5, r = 0.89). Thus, this study produced no evidence to indicate that the Kuder Occupational Interest Survey would help predict success in graduating from a police training academy.

Relationships between Subscale Scores of Police Officers on the Kuder Occupational Interest Survey

Richaid (1969) gave the Kuder Occupational Interest Survey to experienced police officers and correlated their scores on the police officer scale with their scores on the other scales. He reported that scores on the police officer scale correlated most highly with scores on scales for semi-skilled jobs and least highly with scores on scales for social service jobs. The present paper reports data from the male state police recruits in a training academy class (n = 64; M,,, = 24.3, SD = 2.7) who graduated. Their scores on the police officer scale correlated (using product-moment correlations) most highly with scores on the scales for bricklayer ( 7 = 0.91), plumbing contractor (0.90), industrial supervisor (0.90), and television repairer (0.89), and least highly with scores on the scales for university pastor (0.37), interior decorator (0.37), librarian (0.42), and clinical psychologist (0.43). Scores on the police officer scale were also correlated with scores on the scales recommending college majors. Scores on the police officer scale correlated most highly with scores on the scales for animal husbandry (0.82), agriculture (0.81), physical education (0.81 ) , and civil engineering (0.78), and least highly with scores on the scales for English (O.11), art and art education (0.14), foreign languages (0.24), and music and music education (0.28). These results confirm those reported by Richard (1969). They also are congruent with data from these officers indicating that the most suitable college major for them was physical education and the most suitable jobs were ( in order) physical therapist, police officer, civil engineer, mechanical engineer, and bricklayer (Lester, 1979).

Validity of other-gender-normed scales on the Kuder Occupational Interest Survey.

Validity of other-gender-normed scales on the Kuder Occupational Interest Survey.

Validity of other-gender-normed scales on the Kuder Occupational Interest Survey.

Validity of other-gender-normed scales on the Kuder Occupational Interest Survey.

The effects of being interest-inventoried

This study investigated the effects of receiving the results of the Kuder Occupational Interest Survey on several aspects of vocational behavior among high school students. It was found that receiving results increased self-knowledge compared to a control group who received none. Receiving results did not affect confidence in or satisfaction with vocational plans, unless the person had expressed high interest in his or her inventory results before hand. Information seeking was not increased by receiving results, in contrast to findings from other studies, and there were no differential effects for gender or year in school. Implications of these findings for guidance programs in the schools are discussed.